"We have met with success. These pages were a threat to India's national security and we demanded their immediate deletion," Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia, a spokesman for India's home ministry, said.

"Spreading rumours to encourage violence or cause tension will not be tolerated. The idea is not to restrict communication."

Among the blocked content were photographs by AFP and other news agencies from Burma in the British Daily Telegraph, a parody Twitter account pretending to be from prime minister Manmohan Singh and dozens of YouTube videos.

The ABC issued a statement saying it was "surprised by the action" after online content about unrest in Burma between Muslims and Buddhists was included on the blocking list.

India's home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, insisted in a statement the government was "only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumours".

Mr Shinde added that the government sought to block the Burma online photos because they were "disturbing the atmosphere here in India".

The government said photographs of clashes in Burma were circulating on the internet with fake captions claiming the scenes were from the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where 80 people have died in recent ethnic violence.

Backlash

Twitter users, legal experts and analysts criticised the government's approach, which appeared to have resulted in only partial blocking of material, much of which was still accessible.

"The officials who are trusted with this don't know the law or modern technology well enough," Pranesh Prakash, program manager at the Centre for Internet and Society research group, said.

"I hope that this fiasco shows the folly of excessive censorship and encourages the government to make better use of social networks and technology to reach out to people."

"It's completely illegal under the Indian IT Act," he told The Economic Times.

Indian journalist Kanchan Gupta, who is often critical of the government, had his Twitter account targeted by a government blocking order in a move he called a "political vendetta".

Al Jazeera webpages on the blocking list, including a report on the exodus from Bangalore, appeared unaffected by the government orders, the channel's Delhi bureau chief Anmol Saxena said.

Ministers earlier complained they had not received cooperation from websites and social network groups.

United States State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said as India "seeks to preserve security, we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world".

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.